Right in front of him a flock of giant one-eyed vultures—'Cyclops Vultures', the System called them—battled it out with a hyena pack with lightning rippling off its fur.
Just a few hundred feet off, a warthog-like creature leaking venom fumes wrestled with a giant honey-badger over a bloody carcass.
The Barbarian Sage surveyed the scene, soaking it all in, and sighed—letting the screeches and roars wash over him.
"That's the music of the Wilds right there!" he chuckled.
A hyena had managed to latch onto the Vulture's wing. The moment it did its fur went blinding; its body erupted in the Astral Plane, and some ungodly electricity blasted out of it. Sinking deep into its enemy.
The Vulture shrieked. Its feathers blackened, muscles spasming, locking out; the vulture focused its twitching eye on the beast and blasted it with some psychic attack—it looked like heavy heatwaves rippling—but the beast clung on even as its eyes rolled back. More hyenas leaped on, joining in, shrieking in delight.
There had to be two dozen fights going on just in Zane's line of sight. He got the sense it was a battlefield that never stopped.
"If the beasts out here could just stop fighting each other," sighed the Sage, hands on hips. "They'd be a force stronger than any Great Faction. Then again— it'd hardly be the Desolate Wilderness, then, eh?"
But soon his chuckle died off.
Zane followed his gaze.
One of the streams nearby had gone murky black-purple, the color of rotting corpses, and all the grass it touched went that color too. Corrupted.
He traced it back to its origin—its icefall.
A streak of black-purple shot through an edge, slowly spreading.
"It's gotten in here too, huh," sighed the Sage. "Figured. Too much yin energy about these days…"
Then he glanced out left, and his gaze landed on the Everfrost glacier. You could see it from pretty much anywhere in the Wilderness, Zane realized. Like the sun back on Earth. The one still, calm, beautiful thing in this whole brutal place. It fit, somehow.
"'Least it hasn't gotten to the Everfrost," said the Sage, wistful. He clapped Zane on the back. "You ready?"
He nodded.
"Then let's get going. This next bit ought to be a nice little warm-up for you, before we get to the main event. The Bloodsoaked Lowlands… where the lowlives of the Wilds cut their teeth!
***
A few more hops and they were through with the ice. They plunged straight in.
The moment Zane set foot on bronze grass, he was bombarded with aura—from the air, the ground, the hordes of Gods all around him. It felt like he was stepping into a new atmosphere where the air was much richer; it took some getting used to.
He'd barely made it ten strides before the first few beasts came at him.
𝔹𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕫 ℍ𝕪𝕖𝕟𝕒
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟝𝟟𝟘
A few of them had broken loose in the pack, and descended on him in jagged spiky rushes; dark clouds bloomed at their feet, as though each was a little storm unto itself. Together they made a hurricane, a force that could shift atmospheres.
But Zane saw them coming, and got out his hammers with steady hands.
And when the first leaped at him, all gleaming wedge teeth, he fed it several tons of explosion, Radiation, and dense-packed steel.
The manic grins came off the other two after that.
Their jaws bared wider, teeth crackling with lightning; those were where their Sacred Bones showed strongest. If they were cowed by how he'd dispatched their friend they didn't show it. They descended on him from both sides in a fury.
The first barely got a claw in before he caught it by the scruff of the throat, and crushed its spine with his bare hands. His fist exploded with Solar Flare for good measure, torching clean through its neck. The beast slumped.
The other managed three slashes, carving long wounds across his back. It tried the same thing it did with the Vulture. Like some demented battery, unleashing straight into his flesh.
He felt a lightning crack across his body, trying to wrestle control of his muscles.
It made a good effort.
But Zane was no Vulture.
If it wanted his body it'd have to do better than that.
He felt his muscles half-lock out, his cheek twitch—then his eyes narrowed, and he clamped down, and wrestled it straight back.
The better try was how it struck his soul. The greater chunk of that lightning went at his mind.
But it hit a wall even more unbreakable than the wall of flesh before it, and broke against it.
The hyena howled.
He whirled on it, seized it by its legs, and gave it a good ol' headbutt.
Its snout squashed like a tin can.
Then two Solar Flare Punches to the underbelly finished it off.
The corpses vanished. But the blood stayed—some underground force claimed it before the System could whisk it away. He felt roots deep beneath his feet, lighting up bloody in the Astral Plane.
Whoever won, the trees got a good feast.
That got his blood pumping. They weren't worth breaking out his domain, though—his fists took care of them just fine.
He saw the greater horde, some dozens of hyenas, dotting the horizon. So many bulging yellowed fevered eyes watching him intently. And on the trees, too—flocks of the one-eyed birds. Searching him for signs of weakness.
They looked like they were wondering whether to pounce. Then he'd have to bring out his domain.
But they growled and turned away, one by one. Convinced.
"That's it!" said the Sage, pumping a fist. "Don't you give 'em an inch!"
They went along, forging through the tall grasss; a hundred strides later another Vulture tried Zane, and he fed it his Axe. The others kept clear after that.
The Sage looked at home. As he strode it was as though the beasts couldn't even tell he was there. He'd leashed his aura the moment he stepped foot in the field—he gave off about as much as the grass around them. Zane could hardly sense life-force out of him.
When he felt the minds of the scavengers, he got the strange impression he felt quite juicy to them—bursting with vitality. They knew if they could take him down, he'd make the best feast they'd had in ages. Only his fists kept them off.
"A good appetizer, eh?" said the Sage. "These Lowlands, it's scavengers and wastrels mostly. They're no true powers of this Wilderness—we'll get to that. We're still on the outer edges. But make no mistake—the fighting here's no less heated!"
Zane could feel the difference. The bloodlines of the stronger Godbeasts, or Monster Princes, exuded a certain majesty. It put pressure on any lesser power in its presence.
It was what those Hyenas and Vultures felt when they eyed him.
It was enough to keep most of them off. But one particularly chunky beast—a Level 573 'Fallout Warthog'—came charging at him, snorting plumes of deep purple toxins.
It managed to get him with a solid blast—got some of it in his lungs, his eyes. Stacked on all the damage he'd taken so far, it nearly got him under 75%.
Then he growled, and wrecked it with three big hammer-blows.
𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝕦𝕡!
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟜𝟠𝟘 -> 𝟜𝟠𝟙
Now he was well and truly warm.
The Barbarian Sage's mood, meanwhile, was getting better and better; the old fellow started to hum.
"We're nearly there," he said told Zane. He looked like he could hardly wait.
He sensed the change. The Vultures and the Hyenas stayed a few hundred paces behind them—staring out ahead, but not venturing there. Like there was some invisible line they didn't dare cross.
The density of the aura up ahead had thickened considerably, he noticed. A slight shimmer started drifting on the air.
They saw the changes in the grass first. Going from bronze to a grass the color of the void itself; it was sparser, shorter, coming in fuzzy patches that blanketed the land.
"Welcome," said the Sage, spreading his arms. "To the Plains of the Ancients!"
The soil firmed up beneath their feet, grew rockier in places, muddy in others.
The blood-trees gave way next to trees with trunks so thick they looked like grain silos. Topped with squat little branches and fuzzes for leaves, like ramparts atop a fortress.
ℂ𝕒𝕤𝕥𝕝𝕖 𝔹𝕒𝕠𝕓𝕒𝕓 [ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕧𝕖𝕟 (ℂ)]
He saw two eagles perched atop one of them, their bodies splendors of red and gold; flames burned between their feathers. Their plumage seethed with Tier 6 Law.
One of them had a 100,000 year old Spirit Bone in its talons.
𝔹𝕝𝕒𝕤𝕥 𝔼𝕒𝕘𝕝𝕖
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟝𝟡𝟞
Then there were the rivers—far more numerous than in the Lowlands, and thicker too, winding their way lazily through the grasslands. Some fed their way into swampier, muddier stretches where the grounds churned and bubbled, making slow-moving, boiling whirlpools.
Others dipped into crystal-clear watering holes of seemingly endless depth.
But the main attraction was the beasts.
Not a hundred paces off, a watering hole erupted with blood.
𝕍𝕠𝕚𝕕 𝕄𝕒𝕞𝕓𝕒
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟝𝟡𝟝
An enormous serpent that looked fashioned of the void itself—complete with two jagged black fangs.
It was wrestling over a bloody slab of meat. The System told Zane that meat was Heaven B-grade.
Its enemy was a behemoth.
𝔼𝕝𝕕𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟝𝟡𝟡
Zane could only see its head, the only chunk sticking out of the water, and even that was the size of a grown man. It was albino—the color of leached bone, snout-to-neck, except for glowing red eyes.
But what caught his eyes was its domain.
No—not a domain. Something more solid; something that stained the air the colors of mud and stone, that introduced its own elements. It seemed to change the atmosphere where it stood—seemed to change the very nature of gravity, making the waters, the ground sag in. Making its own version of reality.
The Mamba—thrashing, hissing—wielded a domain, tinting the air the colors of murky shadow, filling the space with dark Laws. Next to the Crocodile, it looked flimsy.
The Crocodile's powers steamrolled right over it.
"Half-step True God," said the Sage. "That right there's a pseudo-reality distortion field."
The Crocodile growled, yanked—the Mamba tried to resist, hissing.
Then something flexed in that distortion field. Zane saw all the grasses flatten at once, the stones crumbling in, like gravity had just strengthened several-fold.
The Mamba went shrieking into the watering-hole.
Then the Elder Crocodile let go of the meat, clamped its jaws around its throat, and dragged it under the surface.
Blood stained the waters—there was a mighty bubbling. Then silence.
Each beast right there had an apex Godbeast Bloodline—no less strong than that of a True Dragon. In most any other planet Zane knew, they would dominate.
Here they fought for every slab of meat.
Something about this place warmed Zane's heart.
Everywhere he looked, the Plains were alive. There were lions with burning, sun-like manes chasing down gazelles moving at mach speeds. A Blast Eagle dived at a Mamba. In the distance there was an elephant big as a mountain making its way through the field, golden markings streaking down its body—marks not unlike his own bloody runes. Each step made a new crater.
Then Zane felt a prickling in his soul, and knew something had locked onto him.
It was crouched in the shadows of one of those great trees. Blended in so thoroughly, cloaked so well, it melted seamlessly in—he wouldn't have noticed it if it weren't for his senses. He was looking straight at it now, and all he could see were its eyes. Glowing yellow eyes.
ℕ𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕝𝕕 ℙ𝕒𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟝𝟡𝟟
He felt Spirit Bone powers flowing off the beast, no less strong than the Sabertooth's had been.
He frowned—the aura was not that of a 100,000-year-old bone. Only…
"Well isn't that a neat surprise?" chuckled the Sage. "Thing's got two Bones! One in its fangs, one in the hindquarters—feel it? Neither's a 100,000-year, but still—that's damn near one of the strongest Minor Gods you'll find, I'll wager. Not far from the best of the best!"
The Panther growled and struck.